There was a time when LGBTQ narratives and theoretical lenses had no place in the world of literature and academia. It wasn’t until the late 70’s and early 80’s when queer theorists began to wrestle firsthand with the social forces that silenced them to begin with. From then on, the queer voice extend into contemporary literary fields and provided the world a challenge to the set social norms. Contemporary literature of the 2000’s has greatly dealt with postmodernist themes and actions of deconstructing the modernist systems of their predecessors. Perhaps one of the biggest themes of postmodern contemporary literature is the explication and progression of the domineering force that is patriarchy and toxic hypermasculinity. But how exactly are these writer’s utilizing postmodernist literature to reveal the oppression of this topic?

Junot Diaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Stephen Beachy’s Boneyard are prime examples of contemporary literature that wrestles with solidified social structures that have oppressed outsider personas who behave outside of gender expectation or don’t fit the discourse. Each of the character’s in this article is queer to some degree or form and are struggling with self-discovery and finding a sense of belonging in a society where they have essentially been “othered.” Diaz’ Oscar is straight but “weird” (queer) in the sense that he falls out of place in terms of social expectations of male behavior; Bechdel’s memoir provides an illustration of the queer woman’s struggle with identity; and Beachy’s queer novel uses genre and traumatic prose narrative to completely deconstruct patriarchal and hypermasculine modes of power in typical queer literature style. Thus, these authors are providing postmodern literature with queer ambassadors to represent the instilled and cishet silencing and “othering.”

Diaz’ novel about Oscar Wao features striking presentations of sexism, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity. A young Oscar struggles adolescent coming-of-age experiences in the heat of a brutal Rafael Trujillo dictatorship that plagues the Dominican Republic. Diaz delves deeply into the twisted notions of Hispanic culture’s “machismo” phenomenon, which is a cultural standard as to how men should behave and act. Main character Oscar wrestles with this social structure daily. Oscar is a geeky, unfit, and socially awkward Dominican boy. His interests in “nerdy” pop culture phenomena like Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons virtually dissipate his “cool points” with other boys who submit to the detrimental “machismo” lifestyle. Oscar finds himself helplessly left in the center of a society where men objectify women, accessorize them as sex trophies, and sharply denounce any sort of thing that doesn’t meet the criteria of “machismo” as “gay” or wrong.

Oscar doesn’t find interest in any of these things; at times, he doesn’t understand why that has to be the way things are. Diaz’ narrative timeline of Oscar showcases him going through trials and tribulations that come with trying to discover who you really are. At one point, he attempts to assimilate into the social structure he is in by changing his appearance to fit a more macho appearance and demeanor:

Oscar lost the mustache next, and then the glasses, bought contacts with the money he was making at the lumberyard and tried to polish up what remaining of his Dominicanness, tried to be more like his cursing swaggering cousins, if only because he had started to suspect that in their Latin hypermaleness there might be an answer. (40)

Oscar, of course, discovers that his true self is inescapable and that image does not equate to identity. No matter how powerful and prevalent the discourse around him is, Oscar realizes he will forever be the opposite of what is expected of him. Despite this, he still finds himself suffering from the patriarchal structures he’s forced to live under: both the metaphorical hypermasculine patriarchy of Domincan immigrants and the literal patriarchal dictatorship of Oscar’s native Dominican Republic.  Thus, he and his family continue to suffer and be oppressed under both of these marginalizing forces.

Oscar was increasingly marginalized by the men around him, so much so that it diminished his self-esteem immensely. This left him unable to feel love or belonging from surrounding men and women. While Diaz’ novel strongly focuses on heterosexual men, he achieves in providing a “queer” lens to how we look at the heteronormative straight man. Through Oscar’s story, we can see that patriarchy and toxic masculinity is not just silencing and erasing sexually queer and genderqueer people, but also the straight men that are queer in essence, misfits, and outcasts who simply are not able to fulfill “machismo” expectations. Diaz’ literary answer is that even assumed personas of queerness have ill-fated one-on-one’s with “The Man.”

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home sparks a similar narrative, except one that is more personal and actually deals with queerness as homosexuality and the patriarchal struggles she had as a lesbian with a pedophilic father who died. In the “tragicomic” graphic memoir, Bechdel reminisces on her odd relationship with her father. She recounts the unusualness of her father and his desperate attempts at painting the family as perfect. Her father’s obsession with image and decor had a young Bechdel feeling like a lackey to his housework. Alison aggrievedly recounts of these times: “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture” (14). As the graphic novel progresses, the relationship between she and her father is hardly there. The novel puts us into a montage of scenic depictions where Alison felt the absence of her father even during his presence. We then learn about his pedophilic past and homoerotic relationships with younger boys. With the patriarchal power in her father’s hands, we can assume that her dad’s endless ploy to uphold image was a way of coping with his dark secrets and hidden crimes.

Ultimately, her father’s destructive masculinity and oppressive disconnect from Alison takes its toll on her. The novel grapples with Alison coming to terms with her father’s life after his death—what Alison believes to be suicide. The newly obtained information about her father makes her road to self-discovery much harder as it trivializes what being queer means for her and her family. Bechdel illustrates her transgressions through life dealing with her queer identity in comparison to her father’s past. This comparing opens up Alison to deeper questions about herself, leaving her journey with her sexuality to only be dictated by the aftermath of her father’s death and dark past.

A great deal of this novel deals with repression under the guise of her father’s homoerotic infidelity. Often times, she questions if coming out was the right thing for her to do since a great deal of her family experience is rooted in her father’s detrimental repression of emotions and overall denouncement of freely expressing one’s self and being open. The nature of disconnect within her family’s discourse that has been harvested by her father, is a repeated struggle that left her detached and alone during her process of self-discovery. Her father’s controlling influence over her life greatly influenced how she went about her emotions and turmoils, opting for a masculine answer to emotions, to never show them.

Interestingly enough, Bechdel emphasizes their shared love for literature as an outlet for these two figures to come together and alleviate the destructive nature of her father’s patriarchal effects on her identity. In a world where homophobia and social constructs caused pressure for queer persons like Alison and her father, it was typical for people to escape reality through pop culture, movies, art, literature, and fashion in order to obtain some sort of sense of relief and/or belonging. Bechdel uses this as a key theme for the novel, through their letters, literary references, and tag-team efforts at reading great literary works. It was a way for them to bond through the physical and metaphorical distance they had between each other over the course of their lives.

Alison’s relationship with her temperamental and disconnected father works through resentment and confusion, but readers will find it difficult to sympathize with this. Bechdel’s memoir details the complexities of queer lives trying to survive under solidified structures of male dominance and heteronormativity. In addition, Fun Home captures those uncomfortable instances of sexual identity development in the context of a family setting. While young Alison battle’s through her “daddy issues” to finally come to terms with herself, her father also battles with what society wants of him. He suppresses his feminine desires, veils himself and his family behind glitzy and eccentric furniture facades, and does what any queer person would do in this troubling discourse – fake it and hide.

For Alison, as a woman, his indirect prowess in her life left her prying for any sense of love and belonging she could get from him, compensating what little she could obtain to fill the voids in her that were left open. Bechdel’s memoir strategically provides her that optimistic opportunity of contentment with one’s self after heavy soul-searching. Her depiction of her father also becomes a key contemporary narrative: that not everyone is so lucky. Some people don’t ever find that belonging in a discourse hellbent on erasing their presence. Instead, they are trapped and left wandering through life trying to fit the social molds.

Stephen Beachy’s Boneyard is another example of contemporary literature that deals with struggles of male dominance. The novel is riddled with patriarchal struggles, toxic masculinity, and abuse. This disorienting story details the life of a complex character named Jake Yoder, who wrote a manuscript on his life growing up Amish and his relation to a school shooting in Nickel Mines, PA. Boneyard begins with author and editor notes that clash, setting up the reading experience with delirium and a passion to hunt for the actual truth of the story through repetitive symbols and characters placed throughout the plot. Jake even takes many forms throughout the story, but the facts about him usually remain. He’s only about 14-15 years old and is revolting against an institution of power, namely his Amish background.

Jake is dealing with a lot of trauma that creates a terrible case of mental illness for him. Throughout the story, he struggles to find a place in the world due to these troubles and is depicted to be serially raped and molested by men in power (doctors in mental hospitals, teachers, and church leaders). Jake is gay; however, the abuse he experienced drains away his ability to feel love or desire. Men and masculinity throughout the book are depicted rather menacing. Specifically, Amish men who are cultural and religious leaders.

Many boys his age are described as “rough” and “dirty” while older men are depicted in perverse ways, often preying on him. When he gets involved with the Marines they approach him with provocative homoerotic details. Casual characters throughout the novel are also described in queer ways: “butch,” “dyke,” “femme,” and “hermaphrodite” are just some instances of Jake’s deconstruction of identity and gender binaries leaking into the story. A great deal of the characters are queer, which is typical of queer literature and cinema which express a postmodernist outlook on the world by flipping the societal norms and making LGBTQIA people the majority. Jake’s repression of a sexual abuse manifests itself in surrealist scenes of verbally and visually graphic sex discussions and encounters. Beachy queers virtually everything in this text, creating a world where identity itself is queer.

Jake has grown so accustomed to the abuse that he becomes complacent during the events and with the trauma it causes him, much like how a lot of society sits within the oppressions of masculinity and dominant patriarchy. Jake is a possibly-fictional symbol of this just like Oscar and Alison. Like both, Jake finds himself in a plot where he wants to go against the established discourses of power around him and be free from the social imprisonments he is confined and abused in. Beachy’s writing reveals some of the ideology that comes from patriarchy and hypermasculinity, like binary ideas of sexuality and gender: “Up and down the street, there are adopted sons cohabiting with the natural born sons of their parents. In every family, one son is effeminate and one son is not” (40). It is these beliefs that have left people like Jake, and Alison, and Oscar in great deals of abuse and marginalization for not fitting the social expectations.

Perhaps contemporary literature of the 2000’s seeks to defy established norms for the sake of progression to avoid the persistent turmoils of Jake, Alison, and Oscar. Authors like Beachy, Bechdel, Diaz, and many more are, like their novel character counterparts, questioning why things have to be the way they are. Why must we be complacent in adverse systematic powers just because a modernist era of society did? These three works are less examples for us and more examples of us and the world we live in. This is truly a testament to how important postmodernist literature is for people. It provides us a space to find these character representatives of a narrative that is too strikingly against the solidified cishet white male dominance the literary and academic worlds still operate under to some extent. As voices like Oscar’s, Alison’s, and Jake’s become more prevalent in contemporary literature, we can truly develop an empathy for the other and their story, and completely fragment the oppressors that keep our stories from being told.

Works Cited

Beachy, Stephen. Boneyard. Verse Chorus, 2012.

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Houghton Mifflin, 2015

Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Book, 2008.

– Leonel Loera

Author’s Note: I actually wrote this essay for a class of mine called The Novel, as a requirement. The class revolved around contemporary lit. with an emphasis on postmodernity. When I came across works by Junior Diaz, Alison Bechdel, and Stephen Beachy, I quickly saw a pattern and rhythm to how queer voices were sounding off in contemporary literature. Being a gay student in a small Christian liberal arts school, I began to resonate and empathize with these texts and the creation of this essay review. My gratitude goes to the class and to Professor Larson for providing me space where I can actually explore this socio-cultural phenomenon through theoretical lenses in a place where I didn’t think I’d ever receive such an opportunity. Writing this paper validated my experience on a campus where I have been blacklisted and erased for who I am. It truly confirmed to me that literature is more than just escapist portals to dismiss ourselves from reality. Instead, it is an actual reflection of the realities that we live. It is important to look at literature through that lens because it is only then that you can see what literature really does for people.